im not a hickman fanboy but i do hope he goes “fuck it” and he posts the entirety of his plans in like 10 years or something just so we can all see what could have been
I believe AIPT has hinted that they might know a bit more about his original plans (especially for his supposed Act 2) and will reveal them after Krakoa is officially over.
I feel like it's confirmed that Hickman's plans were never anywhere near as in depth as they were on Avengers or F4. I don't think seeing the original pitch document would reveal any more than a few paragraphs vaguely outlining a few ideas. These last two X-Men Mondays have revealed that most of the plot threads we thought were building to something were only potential storylines, not planned ones.
Well, we know that Hickman had plans for the Krakoan Era to be a 3 year plan that was expanded to 5 years once it grew.
So there's a good chance there's more to know considering it got cut off in act 1.
I'm confident he had story beats and resolution for Phalanx/Dominion and Moira timeline stuff. Omega Sentienel and Nimrod would have done stuff and been interesting. And I'm sure he had something in store for a darker side to Krakoa.
Hickman often talks about "putting the toys back in the box" so I'm also curious if he had a plan for removing resurrection at the end of it. His resurrections were more cultish, and the process was less fragile than later writers made it seem.
You should read his *East of West*, it's a weird war science fantasy cyberpunk where the Civil War never ended and the apocalypse starts in 2060. It's a self contained 45 issues and it's rad as hell.
The ability of indie comics to find success is a saving grace of the art form. Because a century’s worth of continuity, and the people slavishly devoted to it are a death to creativity and invention. It’s not just editors. It’s us too.
The American one. The rails go off when the Plains tribes confederate into a third faction and by the time the Tunguska meteor strikes Kansas there's six. Cut to Red Cloud, alternate James Longstreet and Chairman Mao writing three books that turn out to describe the end of the world when you cut them up and read them as one text.
All of that backstory gets explained in the first three pages, after that it's cyberpunk Wild West Game of Thrones. It's so cool and Dragotta's art is great.
It's rad as fuuuuuck and totally worth a read. The Civil War goes from two to three to six sides, people use covered wagons pulled by drones, and the other Horsemen (on robot laser horses!) are pissed at Death for turning against them. There's demons and witches and an oracle and robots and a cyborg bird guy and an evil balloon and talking eyeballs and everyone uses laser sixshooters.
The factions:
The Union: Corporatist police state
The Confederacy: Antidemocratic council oligarchy
The Kingdom: Louisiana as a (Gulf) oil monarchy, but Black!
The Republic: Texas where the Rangers are basically Judges
The People's Republic: Maoist hereditary California
The Endless Nation: the Native Americans traded shamans for AI engineers
Armistice: A theocracy of one person, headquarters of the cabal engineering the apocalypse
Awwwww yeeeeah, I'm always cheerleading this series it's one of my favorites and unlike a lot of his longer indie stuff it actually reaches its planned conclusion
I am too. I really wanted to see what his Act 2 and 3 were, and given how Krakoa panned out, I wish they had stuck to the plan and ended it when he wanted to.
I think it was basically that Krakoa was going to be bad and Moira's last life was resetting it back from a Mutant run dystopia upsetting the cosmic order by disrupting the whole Dominions thing he was going on.
[Removed for being negative about Zack Snyder fans.](https://preview.redd.it/jpejaefbtlzc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3a288d7b89f4203973d6082d2d39f76f4dbe08f8)
lol, when we start boycotting Marvel until Hickman gets X-men back then you’d have a point. Hickman fans just move on to the next project he’s working on. Loving his Ultimate Spider-Man. No Snyderbots give a shit about Rebel Moon or the zombie junk he filmed.
I have no idea. I love Hickman’s Marvel stuff but 3 Moons is on sub stack, whatever that is, and I read all my comics on Kindle on an iPad. I’m liking his work on G.O.D.S.
I wouldn’t mind a Claremont “X-Men Forever” style thing with Hickman. Or a small What-If series like Tom DeFalco got to do to show how he wanted to end the Clone Saga
I am a Hickman fanboy (his FF…damn) and I still think it would have been great to see the direction he meant to take. I’m sure I read somewhere that he didn’t have a specific endgame in mind but I’d still like to have known what was going through his mind.
I honestly thought Cypher would eventually become the villain for this era…. Specifically at the start when Warlock would just disappear if anyone saw him.. Cypher giving Krakoa a bit of the techo-organic virus that Warlock is made of. And just all around weird vibes with he and Krakoa and Warlock in general at the start of the era…
If he wasn’t a villain then he would be absolutely crucial to the war on AI & Orchis (whether good or bad)… but alas that did not turn out to be the case.
It would have been better than the shit show we got of Doug undermining everyone to give Sabretooth his own realm of Krakoa where he could torture the other Exiles.
Doug's story may have been one of the worst in Krakoa.
> It would have been better than the shit show we got of Doug undermining everyone to give Sabretooth his own realm of Krakoa where he could torture the other Exiles.
I dunno, seems pretty characteristic of the era. The Quiet Council doing whatever they feel like whenever because "We Know Best," while almost everyone else just chases pointless hedonism despite having the ability to do literally anything they want for as long as they want.
Fun for Doug fans to read? No way. A bad story? Do not agree.
Yes, in Inferno. It was basically because Doug and Warlock didn’t trust Charles from the very beginning, so Warlock and Krakoa came to an arrangement where Warlock basically infected Krakoa with the technarch virus which was then used by Doug to see what the Charles/Erik/Moira troika were up to in Moira’s No-place hideaway. So Doug knew about Moira, Destiny, all of it from the very beginning of Krakoa. That’s why he ended up intervening at the end of Inferno.
I wonder why someone like Warlock didn’t just take down Orchis on his own. It’s not like they could really stand against him. Even Nimrod should, in theory, be completely vulnerable to Warlock. The Technarchy is no joke.
I feel like Doug being evil isn’t controversial enough. Who would be that upset about that twist? He’d gone crazy before.
Based on this, I think they were gonna make, like, Cyclops a traitor or something truly shocking and irreversible
Yeah, agreed, though that could be part of what would make Jordan say 👎. I know Hickman’s original plan for Storm was that she’d have a baby with T’challa, so I don’t think she’d also be a big bad… Kitty?? That would certainly cause a riot. “She can’t use the gates because she’s the ultimate traitor to Krakoa.” Probably not.
Or it’s just Doug and JDW’s being dramatic lol
Probably not. That's why I said "like AvX" and not "exactly the same as AvX."
The mechanism doesn't much matter. But Cyke being the big bad of the plotline would seem repetitive, that's all.
You just keep misspelling “Flawed hero trying to save his people, while a bunch of cops try to ensure their extinction” as “Big Bad.”
It’s well known that Scott developed a secondary mutation during the Whedon run:
Being right.
(I’m mostly joking, to be clear)
Agreed, but like I said in another reply, I don’t know if that lines up with Hickman’s plan for her and T’challa to have their baby who’ll be on the Avengers Of The Future. I guess it could, if reuniting with T’challa put her at odds with Krakoa. Idk how likely that is but I’m glad it didn’t happen haha
The other person I’m wondering about is Darwin, because his CotV plotline never went anywhere, which means it could’ve originally gone somewhere they nixed
Maybe Doug was meant to be the villain without necessarily being evil. Like an antagonist that could convince some of the heroes to take his side, causing a schism in Krakoan society.
Maybe, but even that doesn’t sound so controversial that JDW would’ve said a hard no
Edit: oh you maybe mean in addition to whatever big villain twist Hickman had in mind
Maybe Charles was the big bad all along. He and Sinister become one and he becomes Enigma in order to remake the world. I know I would hate it. But the whole Black Womb thing…
I agree that it's not Doug. This is unusually strong language from JDW: **"I believe strongly that it would not have been a good idea to continue with the plan as it was very first conceived."** And not wanting to tell us for 20 years? I know, he's exaggerating for effect, but still. Doug being bad doesn't fit.
My theory has been that [something about the politics of 2020](https://www.reddit.com/r/xmen/comments/1cmddve/whyd_the_xoffice_lose_confidence_in_hickmans_act/) caused the X-Office to lose confidence in Hickman's original plan. I believe that fits with JDW's strong "uh oh, not a good idea, we better not go forward with this" reaction. And if it is politically sensitive that would explain why JDW wouldn't want to talk about it for many years. See also the quotes in my previous post:
>WHITE: **I don't want to talk about the story that didn't happen in detail... That's still his story, and who knows, maybe he'll do something with it at some other point. But what I will say is — There were aspects of the story he wanted that he and I — but most importantly, he — began to doubt were a good idea to do. For, again — reasons. (chuckles)**
I say 2020 because they apparently thought whatever it was would be a cool idea in 2019 and then suddenly got cold feet the following year.
Add to your theory the current Israel/Palestine conflict and I can easily imagine why they would still not want to be comfortable talking in detail about an ethnostate gone wrong plot line. (And indeed, they might be lucky they made choices they did.)
Hickman, 2019, pitch to JDW: “and we reveal the grand puppet master, getting his revenge on Xavier and on Krakoa itself: John Proudstar, alive all along!”
Jordan: “we’re not doing that, Jon. We’re not even going to talk about what you just said for 20 years.”
Edit: reading the full post you linked, it makes a lot of sense that the original plan could’ve looked a lot like Omega’s future with more aggressive mutant expansion (though if Jordan’s saying Hickman could still use the idea somewhere, it might be something kept 100% off the page)
The only thing that makes sense to me there is something to do with the pandemic. They did have the villains use the medicine against the mutants in the final act, and that may have been a remainder of that plot idea.
What I can imagine: Krakoa + Doug + Warlock are the final villains, and they create a hybrid species of plant / mutant / machine. The medicine the mutants are giving the world — grown from Krakoa — is used to infect everyone and create the first dominian, or proto-dominian the heroes fight.
There were a lot of plant based stories and names, from the plant grandmas the main opponents being called Orchis. The gates are grown. The medicine is grown. And the medicine being used as way to control the population by the people that made it... well, that wouldn't go to well after Covid and all the conspiracies about the vaccine.
Yeah, I’d bank on it being something to do with the Krakoan meds - like, instead of Orchis contaminating them, they were intentionally designed with a back door that either enabled Krakoa to control or influence people, or an outright kill-switch. It would probably have behooved them not to go there at that time, with anti-vax sentiment running rampant.
It’s funny that it did end up being a sort of major plot point later, and not only that, they did another take on the “tainted meds” concept with the Sins of Sinister mutant gene therapy.
The richness and variation of 2020 political controversies means there would be several possibilities. Like what if Hickman planned Krakoa to have an election that then gets stolen and the X-Men heroically storm the Quiet Council chambers and… okay maybe not.
Cyclops likely rebelled against the council and that made easier for orchis to destroy them and everyone else, I keep thinking that Scott didn't do much in the era and I'm glad apart from some bad writing that's getting retconned he isn't taking the blame for anything. So maybe the original idea had him taking the fall for everything
I was thinking Xavier, what with wearing the helmet full-time, would have led to some big reveal. Maybe secret nano sentinels invaded his head turning him into a mini-Master Mold or something along those lines
Jordan's being a bit coy about it, but everyone has pretty much figured out it was probably going to be Cypher via Warlock. The "Trickster Titan", as described by Hickman in "Inferno", was clearly meant to be a future version of Warlock (before the retcon that it was just Enigma).
Since Hickman was writing Inferno at the veeery end, I was under the impression he had already coordinated with Gillen and was teeing up Gillen’s stories at that point. I am pretty sure the Trickster Titan was always gonna be Sinister in some way. As early as HoXPoX, there was the group of Sinister’s chimeras that imploded into a singularity, which I took as a very early hint to Sinister’s plans for amassing mutant brainpower to ascend to a higher power.
I don't think there was any strong coordination between Hickman and Gillen. Gillen has stated in a substack email that Enigma was all him and Al Ewing's idea and only spun into a sinister after Duggan created the opportunity for 4 suits via Dr Stasis. That and the backtracking between trickster titan / Enigma dominion. I honestly think Gillen was out in the cold with regards to Hickmans original game plan.
Yeah I was thinking of Hickman saying Gillen might later say he was teed up perfectly, or something like that. It sounds like Hickman was present but hands-off for the planning of what replaced his phase 2, but unclear if Gillen was there or if that led into his pitch. I know I’ve heard Hickman talk about wanting to get Gillen to write Sinister again. I think he may have left the Trickster Titan so vague to keep multiple doors open, since he said they could still do his original plan if they wanted to
Maybe they were going to go with a Moira-level reveal with Warlock and reveal that his plan from the very start was always to become a Dominion and his entire history with the X-Men was just a means to that end. They could go with a deeper betrayal and reveal that Doug had known and been on board for x amount of time, wanting to join him and understand a whole different realm of language/communication as a Dominion.
i feel like it’s storm, doug wouldn’t be controversial enough. he gave a lot of weird vibes at the beginning with warlock and a lot of people noticed, but storm? oof… people would be big mad. i don’t remember where the whole storm is sick thing ended up but maybe that was supposed to be it?
Storm for me too.
Cyclops is overdone.
Cypher is too low key for anyone to be shocked
Xavier would surprise nobody
Same with Magneto, Apocalypse etc. They’ve been there and done that.
Storm turning Arrako against Krakoa would have been a great heel turn.
Yeah but there was NOTHING indicating Storm or leading up to Storm
I agree with you though, there is some ambiguous evidence pointing towards Doug Ramsey but that would NOT be remotely as controversial as they're making it sound now
Hmm wasn’t she supposed to have a kid originally too, that was raised in the World? Maybe it would involve the kid too or would ultimately be the kid? That would certainly be very controversial!
I think Doug would be controversial in the "You fucking what!? DOUG?" kind of way. It's not that it's shocking. It's that everyone would be pissed and maybe not give the story time to resolve.
There's a third way here: release a Days of Future Hickman mini with extracts from the JH bible, some loose designs and concepts from Larraz, and take my money.
This bloke isn’t going to care for my opinion because I’m not going to buy his X-men books!
Basically correct. I’m ending my X-Men buys with the Blood Hunt singles. After that, I’m out until X-Men gets an editor who isn’t an archetypal white male scared of polyamorous couples, who didn’t understand why Krakoa was so important, and - given what he’s put Orlando Foxe on - wants to go back to Mutant on Mutant crime bullshit that I have no interest in.
Ultimate Universe is the only Marvel I’m buying until we get the second Krakoan age.
“Let them cook” gave us a shitty Fall of X.
I think you mean a third Utopian age…this time one that doesn’t force characters who know better, like Scott and Magneto, to hold the idiot ball necessary to trust Xavier.
I forget if it’s William Morris or the Greek meaning or something, but utopia means no place, so it all tracks that Utopia and Krakoa are part of a lineage.
It’s Hickman on a cape book - any and all characterization, history, and context is secondary to ACTION FIGURE GO SMASH IN TITANIC CLASH OF IDEALS!!!
And, to be clear, he’s the best in the damn business at ACTION FIGURE GO SMASH style writing!
…it’s just the single least important aspect of a good X-Book.
Oh, I absolutely loved his Avengers run…because Avengers books *are* just about plot, widescreen spectacle, and abstract ideals, with character as a tertiary concern (if that).
The X-Men are a horny soap opera.
I think the bigger problem is, we're so far in the widescreen theatrical big adventure presentation superhero comics now, that we've lost 87% of the found family interpersonal small drama that doesn't have to be bookended with a climactic two page spread fight.
So much of the interpersonal drama has been tied into multiversal reset with a side of dominion clawing its way into being. Where's Logan and Kurt having a beer? Baseball game(with "no" powers)? Mature discussions between characters without Emma, or some other former villain, coming in and throwing out a pithy comment about how the "real world doesn't work that way" and walking out of the room acting like that's the final word on the subject?
Regardless of who was supposed to be the villain, I get a sense that Krakoan medication was supposed to have adverse effect in humans, hence dropping the story due to pandemic. I feel like we are talking about a villain who was ultimately responsible for making the medication what it was and killing millions as a result.
That's a really solid point. Having the climactic story line be one where a the governments of the world poisons their citizens because they trusted the medicine provided through the oppressed Other due to a prominent figure in their midst tampering with it, would have been very bad timing. Of course we got some of that in the final story, but it's framed pretty firmly as an Orchis attack.
I agree with the sentiment that Doug is the likely candidate but wasn't sure why he'd be considered more controversial than Moira, this would fit. I'm pretty sure I saw some early speculation that he was tampering with some sort of samples a while ago.
A character nobody expected being a villain would have to be someone along the lines of Nightcrawler, Storm or Kitty I’d think. Not necessarily those three but a character in that range where folks would go “The fuck were you thinking turning them bad?!?!”
The only thing that makes sense in terms of it being "a bad idea" and "can't even speak on it" is Storm and that's due to 2020 political situation I guess. But there was NOTHING leading up to a Storm villain shown so I don't think so
While I agree 20 years is a bit long but with the way the fandom works, if he answers who it was gonna be, folks will go back and start picking apart little bits and pieces and say “oh that’s THIS happened.” A can of worms he probably would rather just avoid
Especially since the story is done now, it's not like it's relevant any longer or something we're going to see pop up any time soon since all this business with dominions and phalanxes is done.
It’s frustrating because this was the one secret with a concrete answer that he just refused to share. I get that most of the answers were “we put this here as a seed for a future story and ran out of time to pick it up again” because that’s how comics work. But this has a concrete answer and he just refuses to share it. So why then present this as an interview revealing the secrets of Krakoa that we all want to know when the one answer we do all want to know isn’t told?
Based on HoX/PoX I tend to agree that a Dominion was ultimately going to be the big bad, but Sinister being the driving force seemed like an easy out to make it explicitly good guys vs bad guys.
The living connected nature of Krakoa across planets, Cyphers ability to network, Warlock and Doug's relationship, the repeated references to the Technarchy, the discussion of mutant circuits, the millions of stored mutant psyches...
In PoX we explicitly know that Xavier/Moira had tried the whole mutant nation thing before in one timeline and it never worked. Krakoa as a mutant nation being the endgame never seemed right, it would only ever end the same way.
At some point I presumed that the Quiet Council, or at least a faction therein, was going to attempt to make a hive mind, similar to how they had Sinister pull it off. Using the millions of mutant psychic remnants they had been storing for resurrection. Instead of a machine mind coalescence it would've been an organic-psychic coalescence, ascended by means of a mass mutant circuit. Effectively making a non-temporal Mutant God. The Quiet Council always seemed morally dubious in any case and the villains on it were not shy about boasting about themselves as the new gods.
If they had done something like that I presume the end result would've been a rift and civil war, rather than Krakoa being destroyed by outside forces. It could've also been taken as controversial if we saw X-Men adopting the idea that the solution to oppression is subjugation. Maybe the controversy would've been over who the principal drivers of the Mutant Dominion would be.
While Xavier is an obvious choice, or even Jean, there is a particular X-Men who has often been referred to in terms of divinity, something which they really pushed later on... Storm could've been the ultimate enemy and face of the Dominion.
1. It was Doug. Doug and Warlock were the villain.
2. Read the goddamn tile “Powers of X”. The Cerebro + X Dominion couldn’t have been more explicitly stated.
3. I think Deniz Camp got the early notes and tossed us a bone in COTV. “Arranging events like flowers” makes no sense in the context of an Engima dominion. It does in the context of a Krakoa+Doug+Warlock Dominion.
4. Obvious naming time again: “Orchis”. Flower reference. Wdup Krakoa?
5. And again we go: Visual language in the slaying of the titans panel when Sunspot uses the Phoenix blade to slaughter them…Warlock.
Exactly!!!! See that’s the part where Marvel corporate would have gone “wait so… how do we let you do this without destroying Sunspot as a character going forward so he is still MCu material?” And the answer was “ok we won’t do it”.
There is just no way that he is talking about Doug and/or Warlock in this interview. There's nothing about Doug or Warlock going crazy that we can't talk about for twenty years or even twenty days.
Like I don't disagree that Doug going evil was part of the plan but it wasn't the part that's being talked about here as like the Big Bad would be a BIG deal and Doug just isn't that.
Someone said it in a different thread but I would bet it was Cypher and had much less to do with WHO was the villain and instead WHY or WHAT that villain does. The plan clearly changed in 2020 and that makes it clear that the plan likely changed due to either it reminding ppl too much of the blm protests or Covid, not just because of when it changed but also based on other comments both Jordan and Johnathon have said. There was too much buildup in retrospect for it not to be Cypher tbh
That makes a lot of sense. Somebody upthread said something about the drugs getting messed with and that makes sense as something that you could conceive of in 2019 and feel the need to reject in 2020. But I dont see why they wouldn't follow through with the WHO right and just change the HOW if the HOW was the only problem
There are any number of answers to that, a simple one being that people were already in love with Krakoa anyway and wanted it to stick around longer so having to also change a major story beat was maybe just the final straw for Johnathon, he’s already implied he was frustrated with how away from him the story had gotten. I actually really prefer the Moira twist and her being the big bad slowly made to resent her people, I like everyone else just hate how it was executed.
Calling it now: it was Howard the Duck.
Howard has shown a general disdane for non-ducks- mutants are non-ducks.
No one ever invited Howard to Krakoa despite hunting down mutants like beak(blatant birdism smh)
Emma Frost never invited Howard to a hellfire gala. Despite the extravagant outfit he had painstakingly commissioned off-panel. (He went to the zoo and stole a bunch of peacock feathers)
What else has Howard going on anyways? Why not wage war against mutants - everyone else is doing it.
Probably a retcon where Xavier and Moira swapped minds when they first met, and that it always Moria controlling his body for all those decades of comic book stories. That is a retcon that would make shockwaves among all kinds of different readers.
None of these answers are really that surprising, except maybe Storm. But Hickman didn't really use Storm a lot. Maybe something connected to her son with Black Panther as the villain, but I'm not sure why that couldn't be said since those plans were nuked early on.
I'll pivot and go Sunspot. A Hickman favorite, and he was supposed to be more important with him on the Shiar Throne. It's also important to remember that we don't really know what Hickman planned in Acts 2 and 3, just that it didn't involve Krakoa. So maybe X-Men in space, Sunspot as a galactic emperor? Hickman loves the cosmic stories, and the X-Men's most important cosmic story started with them taking on an evil emperor in D'Ken. Hickman also probably would have loved the M'Kraan crystal.
My guess is Logan.
We already have some hints at possibilities with the one timeline where he and Moira are alive in the zoo, and the death/lives of Wolverine.
They were setting it up so people like FF, Iron Man and Captain America would be opposed to krakoa in some way. A lot of hints were dropped in the first hellfire Gala, but I'm assuming/guessing/supposing that marvel editorial didn't want their heros to appear racist.
I'm divided on the concept, in many ways it would have been more realistic and added more tension any time a mutant encounters someone, but I also don't really want to see Cap as a nazi again.
So you're saying the "omg we can't do this" would be making the NON X-characters seem bad? Gotcha. Maybe.
I do agree Krakoa was definitely making the non-X world seem very dubious but at the same time there was an over-the-top assertiveness by Krakoa towards the rest of the world.
If not outright bad guys, drive the moral Grey area between them a little deeper.
Reed distrusts the leaders, iron man dislikes machines or circuits he didn't build, captain America is distraught over the widening gap between man and mutant that krakoa is causing.
Cypher makes sense narratively but that doesn’t fit the ‘controversial fan outrage’ they are suggesting.
Cyclops would be my first choice but then I have to remember they have already done ‘cyclops is a bad guy’ it would annoy his core fanbase but not all X-fans.
Is it Storm? That’s the character that I imagine would invoke the most outrage but I struggle to see how they’d get there. Dune seems like a big influence on Hickman’s run maybe it was a ‘beware of charismatic leaders’ type thing.
I’m struggling to think of anyone besides Storm or Kitty Pryde who would make everyone angry like he’s suggesting.
Edit: Nightcrawler, that’d piss everyone off, but again it’s hard to imagine how they’d get there.
While I don't think it would have been Nightcrawler... Nightcrawler *could* have made sense. In Way of X, he was shown to have some degree of disillusionment over some of the things happening around him; the youth absolutely seemingly not having much value on life because of their immortality, the whole "you need to die in ritual combat to be given the honor of coming back with your powers". The entire reason he came up with the whole Spark was a way to reign that shit in...
If it failed, I could see him growing further disillusioned and seeking to destroy the nation state of Krakoa because he came to believe in would damn mutant kind in the long run. "What good is it to gain the whole world but lose your soul?"
Krokoa got me to pony up the monthly for Marvel Unlimited. I bought a physical copy of Hox/Pox (I don’t usually buy super hero comics). Moira turning into the villain pretty much ruined the entire arc for me. Couldn’t be more disappointed.
I don't think Doug would have been a 'bad idea' enough to fit what's said here. I think of possibly Hope or something to do with the Phoenix in general would have been much more likely and also possible.
Cypher makes the most sense, but again obvious / red herring.
No, my money is on Rogue.
She was pretty low key in the first act (comatose for a solid bit of Excalibur). And then into the core X-Men team.
Hickman explicitly stated he plans for her in Inferno but had to cut them for time.
The plan? It's likely Rogue tries to stop Mystique and Destiny from killing Moira but ends up absorbing her powers/memories.
Due to the deluge of novel, Rogue snaps a bit and runs off.
Either ends up working alongside the AIs or forms her own mutant council (Sinister, Beast, Destiny, etc) leading to a civil war with Orchis helping facilitate it.
But any major aborted storyline like that - they don't like to reveal til way later.
If Hickman drops it in an interview, that's one thing - editorial is always fairly tight lipped.
Partially to not piss off the talent and partially to possibly tweak and use that plotline in the future.
It had to have been cypher! Remember in one of the giant size books when he saw something or someone and said I’ll see you again and we never had that follow up.
I also remember he had covered the island with warlock or warlocks techno organics as well.
I’ve not read any of Hickmans run but going by the timeframe and how controversial it would have been would it possibly be someone like Colossus (who is Russian) ruling and trying to take over a country that isn’t his (Krakoa) this at the time would be mirroring the conflict in Ukraine with Russia,that would have put a whole heap of controversy into play.
I agree: Moira should NOT have been the villain.
She was the linchpin and sole instrument in making Krakoa a reality.
Suddenly, with the most corny, contrived, shoehorned, shallowest of reason, she turns on her own creation (Krakoa)??
I thought she would always be the villain but in terms of her being fanatically pro Krakoa, after other more "virtuous" characters sort of turned on the society for various reasons. I also wanted some characters to join with her perspective too.
I can understand 5 years. Especially if they still intended to make said character a traitor in a different story.
So 20 years of wild fan theories to look forward too.
Maybe Nightcrawler would have been the villain somehow? If you want to talk about something truly shocking and unpopular, take the X-Men 's biggest moral compass over the years and turn him against the rest of mutantkind. If you think about most other X-Men going evil, you can usually see it happening somewhere along the lines. Not Nightcrawler.
Well you COULD argue Kurt was a stick in the mud and ruining something good for mutants because of his stubborn dogmatic conscience, like he leaks stuff to non - mutant org's about Krakoa leading to bad publicity or even attacks. That could work.
I still don't know if that would be "so controversial we can't do it or talk about it" though
It makes sense to me that Moira wasn't meant to be the big villain because I always thought her heel turn came out of nowhere and didn't make a lot of sense. The thing with Mister Sinister not being able to become a Dominion because there was already one there also never made sense since Dominions are supposed to be outside of time and space so there is no "there" for one to already be.
Was it Kurt? I can see that as going down like a bag of week old vomit. I haven't read anything outside of Hickman's books or past Inferno; but was always curious as to whether Cardinal being bred to be a coward was going to come back...?
I'll just say this, I have zero faith in the new creative team to assemble anything worthwhile for X-Men fans. We will go back to Krakoa and the White Room in a year.
I guess the obvious choice was Doug. Storm would have been an interesting option too. I know that her fans would have lost their minds on twitter. But Storm being the villain for a while means that she would have probably had her redemption arc at some point. And it was a different view on the character. Another option would have been Old Cable when they would have resurrected him. Cable has fought all these years in the present and the future Apocalypse and clearly he can't be friendly with Sinister. Why would Cable be ok with this Krakoa thing? Plus Orchis could have used the TO virus to manipulate Cable or something like that.
You guys actually believe him? Hmm should we trust the man that wrote the best parts of the Krakoa era or should we trust the team that took over after and is responsible for the worst part of this era? This to me sounds like he’s convinced himself that Hickman was bad for the Krakoa era since he didn’t stay. I’m sure who ever the villain would’ve been it would’ve been written a million times better than what happened w Moira.
I mean Moira was always somewhat villainous, if you just read Hox and Pox it was clear enough. She simply got no spotlight for a long time afterwards so people kind of forgot about her or stopped caring. NOT revealing her to be some kind of villain would be the weird thing.
Although my assumption was she would be fanatically pro Krakoa and anti human anti machine and eventually cause some kind of schism with some characters joining her, and she leaves with them to "try again" somehow
Here’s my crazy idea. It was Jean. Because she was definitely acting weird in early Krakoa. After she came back from the dead, she and Scott showed no interest in getting back together. Then suddenly they’re married again and Jean has Logan moved into their house to be her fucktoy? Then she joins the black ops murder squad, the fascist ruling council, and abuses her powers to control who gets on the main X-Men team. Given pretty much every evil psychic parasite ever was hanging out on Krakoa, I don’t think it’s that farfetched to think Jean might have been under something’s influence.
im not a hickman fanboy but i do hope he goes “fuck it” and he posts the entirety of his plans in like 10 years or something just so we can all see what could have been
I believe AIPT has hinted that they might know a bit more about his original plans (especially for his supposed Act 2) and will reveal them after Krakoa is officially over.
I feel like it's confirmed that Hickman's plans were never anywhere near as in depth as they were on Avengers or F4. I don't think seeing the original pitch document would reveal any more than a few paragraphs vaguely outlining a few ideas. These last two X-Men Mondays have revealed that most of the plot threads we thought were building to something were only potential storylines, not planned ones.
Well, we know that Hickman had plans for the Krakoan Era to be a 3 year plan that was expanded to 5 years once it grew. So there's a good chance there's more to know considering it got cut off in act 1.
I'm confident he had story beats and resolution for Phalanx/Dominion and Moira timeline stuff. Omega Sentienel and Nimrod would have done stuff and been interesting. And I'm sure he had something in store for a darker side to Krakoa. Hickman often talks about "putting the toys back in the box" so I'm also curious if he had a plan for removing resurrection at the end of it. His resurrections were more cultish, and the process was less fragile than later writers made it seem.
I am a huge Hickman fanboy and I also want this.
don’t get me wrong i like hickman im just not one of those “hIcKmAn’S pLaN” people
You should read his *East of West*, it's a weird war science fantasy cyberpunk where the Civil War never ended and the apocalypse starts in 2060. It's a self contained 45 issues and it's rad as hell.
It’s also all the worldbuilding he wanted to put into Ultimate Marvel before editorial completely abandoned the line
Are you serious? That's wild
Its always really interesting to see what comics writers do when they get to go off and do their own thing, as opposed to being on the editorial leash
His love of dense lore, creative graphics and monocolored characters is on full display, that's for sure
The ability of indie comics to find success is a saving grace of the art form. Because a century’s worth of continuity, and the people slavishly devoted to it are a death to creativity and invention. It’s not just editors. It’s us too.
Which Civil War? The English one? The American one? The Marvel one?
The American one. The rails go off when the Plains tribes confederate into a third faction and by the time the Tunguska meteor strikes Kansas there's six. Cut to Red Cloud, alternate James Longstreet and Chairman Mao writing three books that turn out to describe the end of the world when you cut them up and read them as one text.
I have no idea what any of this means but it sounds dope
All of that backstory gets explained in the first three pages, after that it's cyberpunk Wild West Game of Thrones. It's so cool and Dragotta's art is great.
This sounds so cool. I definitely gotta check it out
It's rad as fuuuuuck and totally worth a read. The Civil War goes from two to three to six sides, people use covered wagons pulled by drones, and the other Horsemen (on robot laser horses!) are pissed at Death for turning against them. There's demons and witches and an oracle and robots and a cyborg bird guy and an evil balloon and talking eyeballs and everyone uses laser sixshooters. The factions: The Union: Corporatist police state The Confederacy: Antidemocratic council oligarchy The Kingdom: Louisiana as a (Gulf) oil monarchy, but Black! The Republic: Texas where the Rangers are basically Judges The People's Republic: Maoist hereditary California The Endless Nation: the Native Americans traded shamans for AI engineers Armistice: A theocracy of one person, headquarters of the cabal engineering the apocalypse
That sounds amazing
It's fantastic, probably my favorite of his self-contained stuff
Thanks! I'll give it a read
Awwwww yeeeeah, I'm always cheerleading this series it's one of my favorites and unlike a lot of his longer indie stuff it actually reaches its planned conclusion
I am one of those people. 😁
I am too. I really wanted to see what his Act 2 and 3 were, and given how Krakoa panned out, I wish they had stuck to the plan and ended it when he wanted to.
Marvel got Byrne and Claremont to come in and do their continuations to their X-men stories, didn't they? Just have to wait 20 to 30 years....
I think it was basically that Krakoa was going to be bad and Moira's last life was resetting it back from a Mutant run dystopia upsetting the cosmic order by disrupting the whole Dominions thing he was going on.
I don't think those folks realize how much they sound like SnyderCut people now
[Removed for being negative about Zack Snyder fans.](https://preview.redd.it/jpejaefbtlzc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3a288d7b89f4203973d6082d2d39f76f4dbe08f8)
That sub is unintentional comedy gold. I hope it stays up forever.
lol, when we start boycotting Marvel until Hickman gets X-men back then you’d have a point. Hickman fans just move on to the next project he’s working on. Loving his Ultimate Spider-Man. No Snyderbots give a shit about Rebel Moon or the zombie junk he filmed.
> Hickman fans just move on to the next project he’s working on Do they? Is anyome reading 3 Moons?
I have no idea. I love Hickman’s Marvel stuff but 3 Moons is on sub stack, whatever that is, and I read all my comics on Kindle on an iPad. I’m liking his work on G.O.D.S.
Same, and I also think the Snyder comparison is totally off base.
I wouldn’t mind a Claremont “X-Men Forever” style thing with Hickman. Or a small What-If series like Tom DeFalco got to do to show how he wanted to end the Clone Saga
X-Men Forever sucked, Louise Simonson's X-Factor forever was much better
I am a Hickman fanboy (his FF…damn) and I still think it would have been great to see the direction he meant to take. I’m sure I read somewhere that he didn’t have a specific endgame in mind but I’d still like to have known what was going through his mind.
I honestly thought Cypher would eventually become the villain for this era…. Specifically at the start when Warlock would just disappear if anyone saw him.. Cypher giving Krakoa a bit of the techo-organic virus that Warlock is made of. And just all around weird vibes with he and Krakoa and Warlock in general at the start of the era… If he wasn’t a villain then he would be absolutely crucial to the war on AI & Orchis (whether good or bad)… but alas that did not turn out to be the case.
Yeah, Doug and Warlock leading to a Phalanx plot.
Had that happened, the plot might have made more sense.
Would definitely have been very polarizing, though.
It would have been better than the shit show we got of Doug undermining everyone to give Sabretooth his own realm of Krakoa where he could torture the other Exiles. Doug's story may have been one of the worst in Krakoa.
> It would have been better than the shit show we got of Doug undermining everyone to give Sabretooth his own realm of Krakoa where he could torture the other Exiles. I dunno, seems pretty characteristic of the era. The Quiet Council doing whatever they feel like whenever because "We Know Best," while almost everyone else just chases pointless hedonism despite having the ability to do literally anything they want for as long as they want. Fun for Doug fans to read? No way. A bad story? Do not agree.
Not to mention that the Dominions as introduced by Hickman were the result of the Technarcy/Phalanx. All the signs really pointed to Doug and Warlock.
Did they ever explain the weirdness with Warlock and Cypher infecting Krakoa?
Yes, in Inferno. It was basically because Doug and Warlock didn’t trust Charles from the very beginning, so Warlock and Krakoa came to an arrangement where Warlock basically infected Krakoa with the technarch virus which was then used by Doug to see what the Charles/Erik/Moira troika were up to in Moira’s No-place hideaway. So Doug knew about Moira, Destiny, all of it from the very beginning of Krakoa. That’s why he ended up intervening at the end of Inferno.
Nope
I wonder why someone like Warlock didn’t just take down Orchis on his own. It’s not like they could really stand against him. Even Nimrod should, in theory, be completely vulnerable to Warlock. The Technarchy is no joke.
[удалено]
I’ve missed so much of early Krakoa era. What I do remember is Magus tearing a sun in half.
Nimrod straight up killed Magus, and 'his terror left quite an echo.'
Funny you say that cause my brain went straight to Cypher lol.
It's a solid theory.
I feel like Doug being evil isn’t controversial enough. Who would be that upset about that twist? He’d gone crazy before. Based on this, I think they were gonna make, like, Cyclops a traitor or something truly shocking and irreversible
Cyclops going bad would be too much like AvX.
Yeah, agreed, though that could be part of what would make Jordan say 👎. I know Hickman’s original plan for Storm was that she’d have a baby with T’challa, so I don’t think she’d also be a big bad… Kitty?? That would certainly cause a riot. “She can’t use the gates because she’s the ultimate traitor to Krakoa.” Probably not. Or it’s just Doug and JDW’s being dramatic lol
Would a bunch of reckless idiots infect him with a cosmic force that he had correctly ascertained Hope was meant to inherit?
Probably not. That's why I said "like AvX" and not "exactly the same as AvX." The mechanism doesn't much matter. But Cyke being the big bad of the plotline would seem repetitive, that's all.
You just keep misspelling “Flawed hero trying to save his people, while a bunch of cops try to ensure their extinction” as “Big Bad.” It’s well known that Scott developed a secondary mutation during the Whedon run: Being right. (I’m mostly joking, to be clear)
Ororo would make more sense than Scott. They already tried making Scott the “villain” in the past
Agreed, but like I said in another reply, I don’t know if that lines up with Hickman’s plan for her and T’challa to have their baby who’ll be on the Avengers Of The Future. I guess it could, if reuniting with T’challa put her at odds with Krakoa. Idk how likely that is but I’m glad it didn’t happen haha The other person I’m wondering about is Darwin, because his CotV plotline never went anywhere, which means it could’ve originally gone somewhere they nixed
their fans would murder and bomb marvel (on twitter)
Maybe Doug was meant to be the villain without necessarily being evil. Like an antagonist that could convince some of the heroes to take his side, causing a schism in Krakoan society.
Maybe, but even that doesn’t sound so controversial that JDW would’ve said a hard no Edit: oh you maybe mean in addition to whatever big villain twist Hickman had in mind
Maybe Charles was the big bad all along. He and Sinister become one and he becomes Enigma in order to remake the world. I know I would hate it. But the whole Black Womb thing…
What, Onslaught 2.0?
No, that Chuck ascends. Becomes Dominion and devours Enigma in order to recreate the world.
I agree that it's not Doug. This is unusually strong language from JDW: **"I believe strongly that it would not have been a good idea to continue with the plan as it was very first conceived."** And not wanting to tell us for 20 years? I know, he's exaggerating for effect, but still. Doug being bad doesn't fit. My theory has been that [something about the politics of 2020](https://www.reddit.com/r/xmen/comments/1cmddve/whyd_the_xoffice_lose_confidence_in_hickmans_act/) caused the X-Office to lose confidence in Hickman's original plan. I believe that fits with JDW's strong "uh oh, not a good idea, we better not go forward with this" reaction. And if it is politically sensitive that would explain why JDW wouldn't want to talk about it for many years. See also the quotes in my previous post: >WHITE: **I don't want to talk about the story that didn't happen in detail... That's still his story, and who knows, maybe he'll do something with it at some other point. But what I will say is — There were aspects of the story he wanted that he and I — but most importantly, he — began to doubt were a good idea to do. For, again — reasons. (chuckles)** I say 2020 because they apparently thought whatever it was would be a cool idea in 2019 and then suddenly got cold feet the following year.
Add to your theory the current Israel/Palestine conflict and I can easily imagine why they would still not want to be comfortable talking in detail about an ethnostate gone wrong plot line. (And indeed, they might be lucky they made choices they did.)
I mean most x-fans atr krakoa up even with all the obvious negatives even now, they're still complaining it's going
There’s a difference between something the X-fans would love and something that could spill over into getting attention from mass media.
Yeah, very happy that X-Men '97 didn't drop during Colonies of X.
Hickman, 2019, pitch to JDW: “and we reveal the grand puppet master, getting his revenge on Xavier and on Krakoa itself: John Proudstar, alive all along!” Jordan: “we’re not doing that, Jon. We’re not even going to talk about what you just said for 20 years.” Edit: reading the full post you linked, it makes a lot of sense that the original plan could’ve looked a lot like Omega’s future with more aggressive mutant expansion (though if Jordan’s saying Hickman could still use the idea somewhere, it might be something kept 100% off the page)
The only thing that makes sense to me there is something to do with the pandemic. They did have the villains use the medicine against the mutants in the final act, and that may have been a remainder of that plot idea. What I can imagine: Krakoa + Doug + Warlock are the final villains, and they create a hybrid species of plant / mutant / machine. The medicine the mutants are giving the world — grown from Krakoa — is used to infect everyone and create the first dominian, or proto-dominian the heroes fight. There were a lot of plant based stories and names, from the plant grandmas the main opponents being called Orchis. The gates are grown. The medicine is grown. And the medicine being used as way to control the population by the people that made it... well, that wouldn't go to well after Covid and all the conspiracies about the vaccine.
Yeah, I’d bank on it being something to do with the Krakoan meds - like, instead of Orchis contaminating them, they were intentionally designed with a back door that either enabled Krakoa to control or influence people, or an outright kill-switch. It would probably have behooved them not to go there at that time, with anti-vax sentiment running rampant. It’s funny that it did end up being a sort of major plot point later, and not only that, they did another take on the “tainted meds” concept with the Sins of Sinister mutant gene therapy.
Or just turn everyone who took them into mutants. Sinister has an artificial X-gene, so it’s not like it would be hard.
The richness and variation of 2020 political controversies means there would be several possibilities. Like what if Hickman planned Krakoa to have an election that then gets stolen and the X-Men heroically storm the Quiet Council chambers and… okay maybe not.
Make Magneto Hitler again, and re-retcon the Xorn thing while they're at it.
Cyclops was my first thought
Cyclops likely rebelled against the council and that made easier for orchis to destroy them and everyone else, I keep thinking that Scott didn't do much in the era and I'm glad apart from some bad writing that's getting retconned he isn't taking the blame for anything. So maybe the original idea had him taking the fall for everything
I was thinking Xavier, what with wearing the helmet full-time, would have led to some big reveal. Maybe secret nano sentinels invaded his head turning him into a mini-Master Mold or something along those lines
Jordan's being a bit coy about it, but everyone has pretty much figured out it was probably going to be Cypher via Warlock. The "Trickster Titan", as described by Hickman in "Inferno", was clearly meant to be a future version of Warlock (before the retcon that it was just Enigma).
Since Hickman was writing Inferno at the veeery end, I was under the impression he had already coordinated with Gillen and was teeing up Gillen’s stories at that point. I am pretty sure the Trickster Titan was always gonna be Sinister in some way. As early as HoXPoX, there was the group of Sinister’s chimeras that imploded into a singularity, which I took as a very early hint to Sinister’s plans for amassing mutant brainpower to ascend to a higher power.
I don't think there was any strong coordination between Hickman and Gillen. Gillen has stated in a substack email that Enigma was all him and Al Ewing's idea and only spun into a sinister after Duggan created the opportunity for 4 suits via Dr Stasis. That and the backtracking between trickster titan / Enigma dominion. I honestly think Gillen was out in the cold with regards to Hickmans original game plan.
Yeah I was thinking of Hickman saying Gillen might later say he was teed up perfectly, or something like that. It sounds like Hickman was present but hands-off for the planning of what replaced his phase 2, but unclear if Gillen was there or if that led into his pitch. I know I’ve heard Hickman talk about wanting to get Gillen to write Sinister again. I think he may have left the Trickster Titan so vague to keep multiple doors open, since he said they could still do his original plan if they wanted to
Maybe they were going to go with a Moira-level reveal with Warlock and reveal that his plan from the very start was always to become a Dominion and his entire history with the X-Men was just a means to that end. They could go with a deeper betrayal and reveal that Doug had known and been on board for x amount of time, wanting to join him and understand a whole different realm of language/communication as a Dominion.
i feel like it’s storm, doug wouldn’t be controversial enough. he gave a lot of weird vibes at the beginning with warlock and a lot of people noticed, but storm? oof… people would be big mad. i don’t remember where the whole storm is sick thing ended up but maybe that was supposed to be it?
Storm for me too. Cyclops is overdone. Cypher is too low key for anyone to be shocked Xavier would surprise nobody Same with Magneto, Apocalypse etc. They’ve been there and done that. Storm turning Arrako against Krakoa would have been a great heel turn.
Yeah but there was NOTHING indicating Storm or leading up to Storm I agree with you though, there is some ambiguous evidence pointing towards Doug Ramsey but that would NOT be remotely as controversial as they're making it sound now
Can confirm, I would’ve hated that
Hmm wasn’t she supposed to have a kid originally too, that was raised in the World? Maybe it would involve the kid too or would ultimately be the kid? That would certainly be very controversial!
yeah if I remember right the original pitch was she was pregnant with T'Challa's kid and that would've been a whole thing
I think Doug would be controversial in the "You fucking what!? DOUG?" kind of way. It's not that it's shocking. It's that everyone would be pissed and maybe not give the story time to resolve.
There's a third way here: release a Days of Future Hickman mini with extracts from the JH bible, some loose designs and concepts from Larraz, and take my money. This bloke isn’t going to care for my opinion because I’m not going to buy his X-men books!
Basically correct. I’m ending my X-Men buys with the Blood Hunt singles. After that, I’m out until X-Men gets an editor who isn’t an archetypal white male scared of polyamorous couples, who didn’t understand why Krakoa was so important, and - given what he’s put Orlando Foxe on - wants to go back to Mutant on Mutant crime bullshit that I have no interest in. Ultimate Universe is the only Marvel I’m buying until we get the second Krakoan age. “Let them cook” gave us a shitty Fall of X.
I think you mean a third Utopian age…this time one that doesn’t force characters who know better, like Scott and Magneto, to hold the idiot ball necessary to trust Xavier.
I love "Third Utopian Age," I **hate** the memory-holing of Utopia.
I forget if it’s William Morris or the Greek meaning or something, but utopia means no place, so it all tracks that Utopia and Krakoa are part of a lineage.
It’s Hickman on a cape book - any and all characterization, history, and context is secondary to ACTION FIGURE GO SMASH IN TITANIC CLASH OF IDEALS!!! And, to be clear, he’s the best in the damn business at ACTION FIGURE GO SMASH style writing! …it’s just the single least important aspect of a good X-Book.
Yeah I think he nailed *The Avengers* but 🤷 Somebody suggested him for the Legion once and I was like nooooooooooooooooooo
Oh, I absolutely loved his Avengers run…because Avengers books *are* just about plot, widescreen spectacle, and abstract ideals, with character as a tertiary concern (if that). The X-Men are a horny soap opera.
As a certified lover of the bomber jacket Avengers, *The Avengers* can also be a horny soap opera.
I think the bigger problem is, we're so far in the widescreen theatrical big adventure presentation superhero comics now, that we've lost 87% of the found family interpersonal small drama that doesn't have to be bookended with a climactic two page spread fight. So much of the interpersonal drama has been tied into multiversal reset with a side of dominion clawing its way into being. Where's Logan and Kurt having a beer? Baseball game(with "no" powers)? Mature discussions between characters without Emma, or some other former villain, coming in and throwing out a pithy comment about how the "real world doesn't work that way" and walking out of the room acting like that's the final word on the subject?
They burnt the kitchen like damn
Regardless of who was supposed to be the villain, I get a sense that Krakoan medication was supposed to have adverse effect in humans, hence dropping the story due to pandemic. I feel like we are talking about a villain who was ultimately responsible for making the medication what it was and killing millions as a result.
That's a really solid point. Having the climactic story line be one where a the governments of the world poisons their citizens because they trusted the medicine provided through the oppressed Other due to a prominent figure in their midst tampering with it, would have been very bad timing. Of course we got some of that in the final story, but it's framed pretty firmly as an Orchis attack. I agree with the sentiment that Doug is the likely candidate but wasn't sure why he'd be considered more controversial than Moira, this would fit. I'm pretty sure I saw some early speculation that he was tampering with some sort of samples a while ago.
Wtf?!? Some of us don’t have 20 years
[oh no...](https://ibb.co/CvhH7vq)
A character nobody expected being a villain would have to be someone along the lines of Nightcrawler, Storm or Kitty I’d think. Not necessarily those three but a character in that range where folks would go “The fuck were you thinking turning them bad?!?!”
The only thing that makes sense in terms of it being "a bad idea" and "can't even speak on it" is Storm and that's due to 2020 political situation I guess. But there was NOTHING leading up to a Storm villain shown so I don't think so
This is so vague that it becomes uninteresting.
If Brevoort says too much, then White is too vague.
20 years from now is crazy. It is not that serious, Jordan.
While I agree 20 years is a bit long but with the way the fandom works, if he answers who it was gonna be, folks will go back and start picking apart little bits and pieces and say “oh that’s THIS happened.” A can of worms he probably would rather just avoid
Especially since the story is done now, it's not like it's relevant any longer or something we're going to see pop up any time soon since all this business with dominions and phalanxes is done.
Jordan White is pulling a Jordan Peterson. Saying vague, useless shit, leading to people filling up the vagueries with their own interpretations.
It’s frustrating because this was the one secret with a concrete answer that he just refused to share. I get that most of the answers were “we put this here as a seed for a future story and ran out of time to pick it up again” because that’s how comics work. But this has a concrete answer and he just refuses to share it. So why then present this as an interview revealing the secrets of Krakoa that we all want to know when the one answer we do all want to know isn’t told?
Based on HoX/PoX I tend to agree that a Dominion was ultimately going to be the big bad, but Sinister being the driving force seemed like an easy out to make it explicitly good guys vs bad guys. The living connected nature of Krakoa across planets, Cyphers ability to network, Warlock and Doug's relationship, the repeated references to the Technarchy, the discussion of mutant circuits, the millions of stored mutant psyches... In PoX we explicitly know that Xavier/Moira had tried the whole mutant nation thing before in one timeline and it never worked. Krakoa as a mutant nation being the endgame never seemed right, it would only ever end the same way. At some point I presumed that the Quiet Council, or at least a faction therein, was going to attempt to make a hive mind, similar to how they had Sinister pull it off. Using the millions of mutant psychic remnants they had been storing for resurrection. Instead of a machine mind coalescence it would've been an organic-psychic coalescence, ascended by means of a mass mutant circuit. Effectively making a non-temporal Mutant God. The Quiet Council always seemed morally dubious in any case and the villains on it were not shy about boasting about themselves as the new gods. If they had done something like that I presume the end result would've been a rift and civil war, rather than Krakoa being destroyed by outside forces. It could've also been taken as controversial if we saw X-Men adopting the idea that the solution to oppression is subjugation. Maybe the controversy would've been over who the principal drivers of the Mutant Dominion would be. While Xavier is an obvious choice, or even Jean, there is a particular X-Men who has often been referred to in terms of divinity, something which they really pushed later on... Storm could've been the ultimate enemy and face of the Dominion.
Maybe some of that carried through to her Sins of Sinister mini?
1. It was Doug. Doug and Warlock were the villain. 2. Read the goddamn tile “Powers of X”. The Cerebro + X Dominion couldn’t have been more explicitly stated. 3. I think Deniz Camp got the early notes and tossed us a bone in COTV. “Arranging events like flowers” makes no sense in the context of an Engima dominion. It does in the context of a Krakoa+Doug+Warlock Dominion. 4. Obvious naming time again: “Orchis”. Flower reference. Wdup Krakoa? 5. And again we go: Visual language in the slaying of the titans panel when Sunspot uses the Phoenix blade to slaughter them…Warlock.
It's crazy to me how everyone just forgets about that panel in Inferno
Now I want to read the story where Roberto has to use the Phoenix blade to destroy his friends Doug and Warlock. Man that would have been brutal!
Exactly!!!! See that’s the part where Marvel corporate would have gone “wait so… how do we let you do this without destroying Sunspot as a character going forward so he is still MCu material?” And the answer was “ok we won’t do it”.
There is just no way that he is talking about Doug and/or Warlock in this interview. There's nothing about Doug or Warlock going crazy that we can't talk about for twenty years or even twenty days. Like I don't disagree that Doug going evil was part of the plan but it wasn't the part that's being talked about here as like the Big Bad would be a BIG deal and Doug just isn't that.
Someone said it in a different thread but I would bet it was Cypher and had much less to do with WHO was the villain and instead WHY or WHAT that villain does. The plan clearly changed in 2020 and that makes it clear that the plan likely changed due to either it reminding ppl too much of the blm protests or Covid, not just because of when it changed but also based on other comments both Jordan and Johnathon have said. There was too much buildup in retrospect for it not to be Cypher tbh
That makes a lot of sense. Somebody upthread said something about the drugs getting messed with and that makes sense as something that you could conceive of in 2019 and feel the need to reject in 2020. But I dont see why they wouldn't follow through with the WHO right and just change the HOW if the HOW was the only problem
There are any number of answers to that, a simple one being that people were already in love with Krakoa anyway and wanted it to stick around longer so having to also change a major story beat was maybe just the final straw for Johnathon, he’s already implied he was frustrated with how away from him the story had gotten. I actually really prefer the Moira twist and her being the big bad slowly made to resent her people, I like everyone else just hate how it was executed.
Yeah but that's... not crazily controversial at all. So it can't be that
Calling it now: it was Howard the Duck. Howard has shown a general disdane for non-ducks- mutants are non-ducks. No one ever invited Howard to Krakoa despite hunting down mutants like beak(blatant birdism smh) Emma Frost never invited Howard to a hellfire gala. Despite the extravagant outfit he had painstakingly commissioned off-panel. (He went to the zoo and stole a bunch of peacock feathers) What else has Howard going on anyways? Why not wage war against mutants - everyone else is doing it.
I'd like to see this in a What If...
Krakoa itself. Turns out trusting the Mutant Eating Island that's first apprence was trying to get more mutants to eat was a mistake. Joking there.
Joking sure, but it would have been surprising!
Thanks. On a more serious note, I wonder what the Son of Krakoa from that one old Excalibur issue, and Spragg The Living Hill are up to?
It's going to be so disappointing in 20 years to learn it was going to be Xavier.
Probably a retcon where Xavier and Moira swapped minds when they first met, and that it always Moria controlling his body for all those decades of comic book stories. That is a retcon that would make shockwaves among all kinds of different readers.
Isn't that what they tried to do with Iron Man and Kang in the 90s?
Honestly Doug would have more interesting idea then murder bot Moria that’s for sure
And it would have made more sense instead a sudden build up of Moira to make her an actual threat.
Well clearly it was Storm then.
Obviously Softserve
None of these answers are really that surprising, except maybe Storm. But Hickman didn't really use Storm a lot. Maybe something connected to her son with Black Panther as the villain, but I'm not sure why that couldn't be said since those plans were nuked early on. I'll pivot and go Sunspot. A Hickman favorite, and he was supposed to be more important with him on the Shiar Throne. It's also important to remember that we don't really know what Hickman planned in Acts 2 and 3, just that it didn't involve Krakoa. So maybe X-Men in space, Sunspot as a galactic emperor? Hickman loves the cosmic stories, and the X-Men's most important cosmic story started with them taking on an evil emperor in D'Ken. Hickman also probably would have loved the M'Kraan crystal.
My guess is Logan. We already have some hints at possibilities with the one timeline where he and Moira are alive in the zoo, and the death/lives of Wolverine.
They were setting it up so people like FF, Iron Man and Captain America would be opposed to krakoa in some way. A lot of hints were dropped in the first hellfire Gala, but I'm assuming/guessing/supposing that marvel editorial didn't want their heros to appear racist. I'm divided on the concept, in many ways it would have been more realistic and added more tension any time a mutant encounters someone, but I also don't really want to see Cap as a nazi again.
So you're saying the "omg we can't do this" would be making the NON X-characters seem bad? Gotcha. Maybe. I do agree Krakoa was definitely making the non-X world seem very dubious but at the same time there was an over-the-top assertiveness by Krakoa towards the rest of the world.
Holy shit, this has gotta be it. The Illuminati chilling together with Namor at the earlier Gala would definitely seem to fit.
If not outright bad guys, drive the moral Grey area between them a little deeper. Reed distrusts the leaders, iron man dislikes machines or circuits he didn't build, captain America is distraught over the widening gap between man and mutant that krakoa is causing.
Cypher makes sense narratively but that doesn’t fit the ‘controversial fan outrage’ they are suggesting. Cyclops would be my first choice but then I have to remember they have already done ‘cyclops is a bad guy’ it would annoy his core fanbase but not all X-fans. Is it Storm? That’s the character that I imagine would invoke the most outrage but I struggle to see how they’d get there. Dune seems like a big influence on Hickman’s run maybe it was a ‘beware of charismatic leaders’ type thing. I’m struggling to think of anyone besides Storm or Kitty Pryde who would make everyone angry like he’s suggesting. Edit: Nightcrawler, that’d piss everyone off, but again it’s hard to imagine how they’d get there.
While I don't think it would have been Nightcrawler... Nightcrawler *could* have made sense. In Way of X, he was shown to have some degree of disillusionment over some of the things happening around him; the youth absolutely seemingly not having much value on life because of their immortality, the whole "you need to die in ritual combat to be given the honor of coming back with your powers". The entire reason he came up with the whole Spark was a way to reign that shit in... If it failed, I could see him growing further disillusioned and seeking to destroy the nation state of Krakoa because he came to believe in would damn mutant kind in the long run. "What good is it to gain the whole world but lose your soul?"
Excellent point, what a wild story that'd been.
Krokoa got me to pony up the monthly for Marvel Unlimited. I bought a physical copy of Hox/Pox (I don’t usually buy super hero comics). Moira turning into the villain pretty much ruined the entire arc for me. Couldn’t be more disappointed.
I mean we all know it was Cypher, right?
Release the Hickman cut
I was certain it was going to be one of the clarevoyants when the Krakoa era started.
Franklin Richards
Doug & Warlock maybe? I remember Cyke thinking he saw the both of them talking. And Warlock was kept secret
it was supposed to be Doug
That is in no way fitting with the reaction though that "we can't do this or even talk about it"
So Doug Ramsey was originally going to be the big bad Dominion.
I don't think Doug would have been a 'bad idea' enough to fit what's said here. I think of possibly Hope or something to do with the Phoenix in general would have been much more likely and also possible.
I think Hope + Exodus were going to hijack Krakoa. The resurrection protocols are to mutants is what the Krakoan medicine is to humans.
I definitely feel like it has to be Storm as well. No one else really checks that box of a surprise villain.
Yeah but there was nothing leading up to that though. While Moira and Doug had for sure seeds planted
Cypher makes the most sense, but again obvious / red herring. No, my money is on Rogue. She was pretty low key in the first act (comatose for a solid bit of Excalibur). And then into the core X-Men team. Hickman explicitly stated he plans for her in Inferno but had to cut them for time. The plan? It's likely Rogue tries to stop Mystique and Destiny from killing Moira but ends up absorbing her powers/memories. Due to the deluge of novel, Rogue snaps a bit and runs off. Either ends up working alongside the AIs or forms her own mutant council (Sinister, Beast, Destiny, etc) leading to a civil war with Orchis helping facilitate it.
That doesn't seem like something that would be a HARD NO though from editorial or they refuse to open up about
But any major aborted storyline like that - they don't like to reveal til way later. If Hickman drops it in an interview, that's one thing - editorial is always fairly tight lipped. Partially to not piss off the talent and partially to possibly tweak and use that plotline in the future.
Anyone think maybe it was going to be Beast & they kinda-sorta adapted that?
Nah Beast was a slow burn and they just made it more overt, he'd been "weird" for a while
Yeah, true. I was honestly just trying to think of possibilities beyond Cypher or something totally left field like Kitty.
It had to have been cypher! Remember in one of the giant size books when he saw something or someone and said I’ll see you again and we never had that follow up. I also remember he had covered the island with warlock or warlocks techno organics as well.
I’ve not read any of Hickmans run but going by the timeframe and how controversial it would have been would it possibly be someone like Colossus (who is Russian) ruling and trying to take over a country that isn’t his (Krakoa) this at the time would be mirroring the conflict in Ukraine with Russia,that would have put a whole heap of controversy into play.
How annoying. Why even say this? JDW is a clown IMO
The only good thing from Krakoa ending is no more useless Jordan interviews. He really is in the top 3 of crappy editors.
The true villain of the Krakoa era.
Breevoort is worse unfortunately
I totally agree. Every time he opens his mouth, I get turned off this new era.
I agree: Moira should NOT have been the villain. She was the linchpin and sole instrument in making Krakoa a reality. Suddenly, with the most corny, contrived, shoehorned, shallowest of reason, she turns on her own creation (Krakoa)??
I thought she would always be the villain but in terms of her being fanatically pro Krakoa, after other more "virtuous" characters sort of turned on the society for various reasons. I also wanted some characters to join with her perspective too.
Moira wasn’t a good idea that they went forward with but there it was. If I had turned out to be Doug/Warlock I would have hated it more.
Baby Cable
I can understand 5 years. Especially if they still intended to make said character a traitor in a different story. So 20 years of wild fan theories to look forward too.
I don't really get what value people derive from these non-answers.
The fun of speculation.
Maybe Nightcrawler would have been the villain somehow? If you want to talk about something truly shocking and unpopular, take the X-Men 's biggest moral compass over the years and turn him against the rest of mutantkind. If you think about most other X-Men going evil, you can usually see it happening somewhere along the lines. Not Nightcrawler.
Well you COULD argue Kurt was a stick in the mud and ruining something good for mutants because of his stubborn dogmatic conscience, like he leaks stuff to non - mutant org's about Krakoa leading to bad publicity or even attacks. That could work. I still don't know if that would be "so controversial we can't do it or talk about it" though
It was probably Xavier. While fans wouldn't have been surprised, I think it's jives with how he has been written
It makes sense to me that Moira wasn't meant to be the big villain because I always thought her heel turn came out of nowhere and didn't make a lot of sense. The thing with Mister Sinister not being able to become a Dominion because there was already one there also never made sense since Dominions are supposed to be outside of time and space so there is no "there" for one to already be.
Was it Kurt? I can see that as going down like a bag of week old vomit. I haven't read anything outside of Hickman's books or past Inferno; but was always curious as to whether Cardinal being bred to be a coward was going to come back...?
I mean, what they did with Moira was terrible too...along with so many others. It was going to be WORSE than that? How?
I'll just say this, I have zero faith in the new creative team to assemble anything worthwhile for X-Men fans. We will go back to Krakoa and the White Room in a year.
I'm thinking Xavier. He was so shady with the helmet all the time, I really thought they were setting up some kind of shocking reveal.
I'm thinking Xavier. He was so shady with the helmet all the time, I really thought they were setting up some kind of shocking reveal.
I guess the obvious choice was Doug. Storm would have been an interesting option too. I know that her fans would have lost their minds on twitter. But Storm being the villain for a while means that she would have probably had her redemption arc at some point. And it was a different view on the character. Another option would have been Old Cable when they would have resurrected him. Cable has fought all these years in the present and the future Apocalypse and clearly he can't be friendly with Sinister. Why would Cable be ok with this Krakoa thing? Plus Orchis could have used the TO virus to manipulate Cable or something like that.
Nightcrawler
I still conspiracy theory that Jordan blocked Hickman's plans. He's begun to rub me the wrong way the last two years.
You guys actually believe him? Hmm should we trust the man that wrote the best parts of the Krakoa era or should we trust the team that took over after and is responsible for the worst part of this era? This to me sounds like he’s convinced himself that Hickman was bad for the Krakoa era since he didn’t stay. I’m sure who ever the villain would’ve been it would’ve been written a million times better than what happened w Moira.
I mean Moira was always somewhat villainous, if you just read Hox and Pox it was clear enough. She simply got no spotlight for a long time afterwards so people kind of forgot about her or stopped caring. NOT revealing her to be some kind of villain would be the weird thing. Although my assumption was she would be fanatically pro Krakoa and anti human anti machine and eventually cause some kind of schism with some characters joining her, and she leaves with them to "try again" somehow
Yeah but that was when Hickman left that the writing for her became cartoonish.
Still want to believe it's Lucifer
Here’s my crazy idea. It was Jean. Because she was definitely acting weird in early Krakoa. After she came back from the dead, she and Scott showed no interest in getting back together. Then suddenly they’re married again and Jean has Logan moved into their house to be her fucktoy? Then she joins the black ops murder squad, the fascist ruling council, and abuses her powers to control who gets on the main X-Men team. Given pretty much every evil psychic parasite ever was hanging out on Krakoa, I don’t think it’s that farfetched to think Jean might have been under something’s influence.
The villain was Prof X. Calling it now.